Sam Carpenter on “relentless system improvement”

"It is good to root out weaknesses in advance."

Here is an excerpt from a recent post by Sam Carpenter at his website. To read the complete article, check out other resources, and/or sign up for free email updates, please click here.

I’m writing this post because the one I published last week had some problems. Last Wednesday, the day after I emailed Choose the Red Pill [please click here] to my subscriber list, I read through it and found several grammatical errors and some clumsy paragraphs. Also, I thought it was too complex as well as a bit melodramatic at the end. Bypassing my standard protocol of relentless system improvement, I had put the post together at the last minute and sent it out too fast.

I deemed the piece ready-for-public-consumption simply because I wanted it to be. Deluding myself, I violated my own rules about system improvement. (For a definition of system improvement, see page 11 in my book, Work the System.

This failure inspires me to discuss a half-dozen points about the system improvement process. Here, I will discuss my weekly Work the System blog posts, and a little bit about Centratel, but the points I make apply to any work or personal context in which there are recurring tasks to be executed. Be imaginative. Especially think about your business or job.

I already covered the first point: Root out and acknowledge failure. Don’t muddle reality by conjuring up some dubious silver lining. Bury the ego and face facts: If you screwed up, you screwed up.

Point two: Remember exactly what the task is and what is to be done with it. For example, this blog post is an individual system with a purpose. It is a singular, enclosed entity designed to deliver a message and to entertain. Improvement is what I do to it. (Hence, “system improvement.”)

A third point: Use failures as red flags so action can be taken to prevent the failures from happening again. In fact, assertively seek out failures. Your job is to find weaknesses in your systems and then to fix them.

My cycle of writing a typical 1,000 word post is one week long. On Wednesday or Thursday I spend just a half-hour writing the rough draft. Then, over the next five or six days I spend an additional eight to ten hours tweaking it until it’s ready to post on Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week. I’m relentless in this phase, performing this read-through editing in thirty to forty separate sessions. Between each session, I clear my head by doing some other activity so each read-through is from a different mental perspective. Even then, I’m not done: After the piece is posted and delivered, and over the next few weeks, I’ll go back four to six separate times to further polish it. Point four: Repeatedly execute the system from scratch, each time looking for weaknesses. Thus, 5% of time is spent in creation of the raw product and 95% of time is spent perfecting it.This is working the system!

For any of us, the repetition of various systems is no problem. It’s what we do. We have tasks to execute and so we execute them. But too many people leave it at that, only to fire-kill through work, relationships and life, blindly negotiating the same old problems over and over again. They don’t analyze the source of recurring problems and thus don’t take steps to stop them from happening again.

It’s a good time to say it: System improvement is the opposite of fire-killing.

My process for writing a blog post is a perfect analogy for how I spend my working hours at Centratel. My time is invested in relentless system improvement and I seldom do the “work.” Point five: For the leader, most work is either delegated or automated. At Centratel, I pay the bills, conduct staff meetings and occasionally go back and forth with my management staff on special issues. That’s it, for a total work-time at Centratel of less than two hours per week.

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Which do you choose: a life of fire-killing or a life of system improvement?

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Sam Carpenter is a resident of Bend, Oregon, author of Work the System, and speaker. He has been featured by hundreds of media, including NPR, ESPN radio, US News Radio, and Small Business Television. President and CEO of Centratel (www.centratel.com), the premier telephone answering service in the United States, Sam has a background in engineering, publishing, telecommunications and journalism. Sam founded and oversees Kashmir Family Aid, a 501c3 non-profit that aids surviving school children of the Northern Pakistan and Azad Kashmir earthquake of October 2005.

Photo by Nigel Blake via flickr used under a creative Commons License.

Gill Corkindale: Five Leadership Lessons from the BP Oil Spill

Gill Corkindale

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Gill Corkindale for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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It will be months, if not years, before the full impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill will be fully understood — environmentally, commercially, and politically. In this respect, and the fact that the disaster will have a deep effect on the Unites States psyche, President Obama was correct to draw comparisons with the situation in the Gulf of Mexico and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. That said, it is hard to draw any more meaningful comparisons between the two disasters — unless we consider the glaring differences in the quality of leadership displayed during the last two months. What have we learned?

Let’s look at 9/11 first. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, leaders in the United States and around the world united to offer an inspiring, reflective, and constructive response to the disaster. Recognition of the enormity of the tragedy was followed by restraint, as leaders paused and reflected before taking action. New York Mayor Giuliani in particular understood the importance of leading in a manner that improved, rather than exacerbated, an extremely difficult and tense situation. Ordinary people responded in extraordinary ways, while offers of help and support were accepted with good grace. When the work of restoration began, it was done collectively, without blame or recriminations. There were many examples of good leadership during and after 9/11.
What a different picture we have seen during the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. The behaviours and attitudes of leaders have been disappointing at best and irresponsible at worst. In this crisis, even some basic elements of leadership have been flouted or misunderstood by the key players.

[Here are two of the five lessons she cites and then discusses.]

Most obviously culpable and reprehensible are the leaders of BP, who are ultimately responsible for this environmental disaster. It appears that CEO Tony Hayward presided over an organisational culture that sanctioned extreme risk-taking, ignored expert advice, overlooked warnings about safety issues and hid facts. Their failure to respond to the disaster with sufficient speed and attention was a direct consequence of this flawed culture. Lesson 1: Crises expose dysfunctional organisational cultures.

With its army of media advisers and PR professionals, BP made the mistake of trying to spin its way out of this crisis rather than tackling it head on. Tony Hayward should have realised — or been advised — that there are some crises that cannot be spun. Instead, he has done untold damage to BP’s reputation with his gaffes and apparent inability to understand public reaction to his comments. He appears weak, petty, defensive and lacking a grip on the situation. Not surprisingly, he has been moved aside to make way for Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, whose gravitas is unquestionable, but who appears equally clueless in the spotlight. Lesson 2: Leaders must recognise when a crisis can’t be spun.

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These are just a few thoughts about the situation unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico and some of the parallels that can be drawn for leaders. What are your thoughts? Do you have any constructive suggestions? And if you could send one message to the leaders in this crisis, what would it be? As ever, I look forward to, and appreciate, your views.

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

Gill Corkindale is an executive coach and writer based in London, focusing on global management and leadership. She was formerly management editor of the Financial Times.

John Tierney on discovering the virtues of a wandering mind

John Tierney

Here is an excerpt from an article written by John Tierney for The New York Times (June 28, 2010). To read the complete article, please click here.

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At long last, the doodling daydreamer is getting some respect.

In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.

Consider, for instance, these three words: eye, gown, basket. Can you think of another word that relates to all three? If not, don’t worry for now. By the time we get back to discussing the scientific significance of this puzzle, the answer might occur to you through the “incubation effect” as your mind wanders from the text of this article — and, yes, your mind is probably going to wander, no matter how brilliant the rest of this column is.

Mind wandering, as psychologists define it, is a subcategory of daydreaming, which is the broad term for all stray thoughts and fantasies, including those moments you deliberately set aside to imagine yourself winning the lottery or accepting the Nobel. But when you’re trying to accomplish one thing and lapse into “task-unrelated thoughts,” that’s mind wandering.

During waking hours, people’s minds seem to wander about 30 percent of the time, according to estimates by psychologists who have interrupted people throughout the day to ask what they’re thinking. If you’re driving down a straight, empty highway, your mind might be wandering three-quarters of the time, according to two of the leading researchers, Jonathan Schooler and Jonathan Smallwood of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“People assume mind wandering is a bad thing, but if we couldn’t do it during a boring task, life would be horrible,” Dr. Smallwood says. “Imagine if you couldn’t escape mentally from a traffic jam.”

You’d be stuck contemplating the mass of idling cars, a mental exercise that is much less pleasant than dreaming about a beach and much less useful than mulling what to do once you get off the road. There’s an evolutionary advantage to the brain’s system of mind wandering, says Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota and one of the pioneers of the field.

“While a person is occupied with one task, this system keeps the individual’s larger agenda fresher in mind,” Dr. Klinger writes in the Handbook of Imagination and Mental Stimulation. [Click here.] “It thus serves as a kind of reminder mechanism, thereby increasing the likelihood that the other goal pursuits will remain intact and not get lost in the shuffle of pursuing many goals.”
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To read the complete article, please click here.

John Tierney, whose column appears Tuesdays and Saturdays on the Op-Ed page, has been with The New York Times since 1990. He wrote about New York in “The Big City” column, which ran from 1994 to 2002, first in The New York Times Magazine and then twice a week in The Times‘s Metro Section. From 2002 until 2005, except for a stint in 2003 in the Baghdad bureau, he was a correspondent in the Washington bureau, and wrote the weekly “Political Points” column during the 2004 presidential campaign.

The Jury Is In – We Are, Nearly All, World-Class Time Wasters!

I don’t manage my time well enough.  Do you?

The answer, almost certainly, is “no.” Not many of us do. Spock did – and, I suspect David Allen does. And Peyton Manning. But most of us are mere mortals, and we are: off focused, easily distracted, lazy, following the wrong priorities, following no priorities… We are, to put it simply, world-class time wasting human beings. That’s why the time management section has so many best sellers. It’s kind of like the “diet” section. The reason there are so many best-sellers is that there are so many of us who have so little control. (By the way, as close as I can tell, there is only one way to lose weight – take in fewer calories than you burn – over the long haul! And that is really, really, really hard).

Bob Morris has already reviewed the newest book in the field, 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam. (Read his review here).

This morning, Slate.com has a terrific article about this book/this problem: A Time-Management Book Changed My Life! (Again.) — A review of Laura Vanderkam’s 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by KJ Dell’Antonia. But it’s not a “review.” It’s a confessional – for all of us. It is filled with honest, revealing paragraphs. Like these:

Did I, with Vanderkam’s help, come up with a radical new way of thinking about time?
Not even close. What’s remarkable about my experience with 168 Hours isn’t that I gained an extra two hours—it’s that I gained them by following essentially the same advice I could have found in any of the other dozen books in my stack. Every one starts with measurement: The 25 Best Time-Management Tools and Techniques demands that you “Find Out What Time Means to You!” by tracking what you’re doing every five minutes for a week. Sarah Susanka gently encourages seekers of The Not-So-Big Life to “understand our relationship with time” through the use of a multipage time-usage questionnaire. The advice that follows, too, is the same: Eliminate the waste and cease the frittering. “Get rid of non-core-competency work,” says Vanderkam; “Prioritize the important over the urgent,” Time Management for Creative People tells me. Make a list of the things you should do, and the things you have to do, James T. McCay told the Greatest Generation in The Management of Time, published 50 years ago. Now take the list of things you “should do” and throw it away.

Time management is like an American form of Buddhism: a complete and graceful ability to do everything you want to do in precisely the time you’ve been given is our nirvana. Seekers (like me) are happy to read and apply the same advice again and again, because a systematic approach makes that feeling of having as much time as you need seem within reach. “Numbers,” said Gary Wolf, writing about the urge to track our lives for the New York Times Magazine, “make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually.” And that’s the sucker punch of the time-management approach: It turns the question of “not having enough time” into a math problem, and allows the real issue to slip under the radar.

And the article ends with this:

The call of 168 Hours is the call of the brief spiritual check-in. “Are we putting enough of ourselves into the stuff that’s most important?” is a question everybody asks once in a while. Some people ask it in church, some in post-yoga Savasana. Millions of Type-A Americans, list-makers and time-trackers all, cloak it in the guise of making the most of our time. But the real issue is the same for everybody: We’re here, and then we’re not. Whatever comes in between those clauses takes more than a little time to figure out.

I have taught time management. I have read so many books. The article lists all of these: 25 Best Time Management Tools and Techniques; The Not-So-Big-Life; Addicted to Stress; Getting Things Done; Never Be Late Again; Managing Life With Kids; The Four-Hour Workweek; Time Management for the Creative Person – and left off the classic How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life by Alan Lakein.

I have tried the ideas, implemented the steps – and I still have not come close to mastering this challenge.

If you manage your time really well, you don’t need this book.  And I envy you.  If you don’t manage your time well, this book is probably a great new book to read.

But actually doing it – well, good luck!

The time management problem – for must of us, it is the ultimate knowing-doing gap.

Michael Bungay Stanier on “the power of the peak moment”

Michael Bungay Stanier

In Do More Great Work published by Workman Publishing (2010), Michael Bungay Stanier explains how to “stop the busywork, and start [and complete] the work that [really] matters.” For example, understanding and then leveraging the power of peak moments.

“One of the beauties of stopping to acknowledge your peak moments is that they can help you clarify your personal definition of success. They tap the power of subjective experience rather than objective accomplishments. When you think about your peak moments (as you are about to do), remember, recall how you felt, not what you outwardly accomplished (although the two can go hand in hand).”

1. Think back and remember three or four peak moments over the course of your working life thus far. “It’s something you’re proud of, something that has stayed in your memory and perhaps even now brings a smile to your face and a thrill to your heart as you remember what you did”…and how you felt.

2. If you wish, add one or two peak moments from outside your work life. “Id like you to focus on a moment that is all about you.”

3. Give each of those peak moments a title, and write down the titles down.

4. Now write a short description (only one or two sentences) what happened.

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it) but ‘That’s funny….’” Isaac Asimov

5. Now look along the row of those peak moments. “Some of the themes will be about you – what you’re like and what you’re doing when you’re connected to Great Work. Some will be about the types of situations that tend to help you do more Great Work.”

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I urge you to visit Stanier’s Web site (click here) to check out a wealth of resources that include a free 13-week eCourse that requires only three minutes of course work each week, map templates for various exercises, and The Great Work Interview Series (e.g. David Allen, Guy Kawasaki, and Marshall Goldsmith).

“Clarity dissolves resistance.”

Cheryl  offers: I was at DFW today catching a business flight to Nashville TN. Most people traveling this month seemed to be dressed quite casually, really comfortable for the hot summer months, with a few noticeable exceptions. The one exception that caught my eye was women in 5 inch high heels. Don’t get me wrong, I like high heels myself. In fact I wear them frequently, mostly because I’m pretty short and they make me feel more powerful.  However I do avoid them when I travel for several reasons. The first and foremost reason is safety. I can imagine how hard it would be to flee a potential plane disaster in high heels, sprinting to safety seems close to impossible. Like many travelers, my feet swell when I travel.  In high heels it can become an almost unbearable situation when walking long distances such as gate changes, terminal changes, and the inevitable walk to your parked car. I know, I’ve done all of these in high heels and that’s why I wear comfortable flats when I travel now. My desire to look professional, chic and hip are still a part of me; and a statement from the new bestseller SWITCH: HOW TO CHANGE THINGS WHEN CHANGE IS HARD by Dan Heath and his brother Chip Heath helps me deal with it better. They write “Clarity dissolves resistance.” How true! Once I was clear on the perils of running in high heels and walking long distances in shoes that feel a size too small after a long flight, my resistance to wearing low healed comfortable shoes dissolved completely.  Who knew it could be explained in just 3 words? And by the way, this is a terrific book for lots of other reasons.

Ira Chaleff’s thoughts about personal organization and self-management

Ira Chaleff

“We are responsible for self-management. Our success at self-management creates both the credibility and resources to initiate changes that will improve the organization. A key to self-management is personal organization. Effectiveness either begins or ends there. Self-management encompasses the nuts and bolts of effective leadership or followership. It is mundane. It is pedestrian. Yet self-management is a critical skill, and a courageous follower must be prepared to do the hard work involved in being personally well-organized.”

Chaleff identifies several areas in which we must all strive for a high degree of self-organization. Here they are:

1. How we process information within and beyond our work environment must be clearly established and then maintained.

2. Everything we need to complete a task (e.g. tools, material, and information) must be easily accessible and well-maintained.

3. Appropriate procedures must be in place to monitor, upgrade, and protect resources.

4. The criteria and metrics by which work is measured and evaluated must be clearly understood and consistently applied.

5. Complex activities and procedures must be constantly evaluated in order to maximize simplicity (as Albert Einstein suggests, “Make everything as simple as possible…but no simpler”) to eliminate redundancies, respond to omissions, and maximize utilization of resources.

6. Prioritize and then schedule work to accommodate available resources (especially time) amidst competing demands for them, then stick to schedule.

7. Document all requests for information or action and then track for follow-through and timely closure.

8. Delegate as much work as possible — and appropriate — to those who have already been carefully developed to assume both authority and responsibility for its completion. No bottlenecks!

Chaleff discusses all this in much greater detail in The Courageous Follower: Standing Up to & for Our Leaders, published Berrett-Koehler Publishers (2003).

Peter B. Vaill on the ambiguities of managerial leadership

Peter B. Vaill

Here are some invaluable insights from Peter B. Vaill:

“The effectiveness of everything a managerial leader does depend on the meaning that other people attach to it. You can’t lead money; you can’t lead physical resources; you can’t lead plant and equipment; the only thing you can lead is people. It’s all about the meaning others attach to one’s actions.

“So you’re in a world of human beings, and that means you better darn well understand how human beings form meanings, change meanings, what role meanings play in their overall psychological well-being and functioning. If you just take for granted that everybody knows what the things mean around here and everybody knows what the mission means and everybody knows what the job means and all that, if you just take that for granted, you are in peril. Human beings’ meanings are extraordinarily important psychologically and spiritually, and they are also very resistant to change. They form and re-form out of sight of other people. They go deep back into the person’s own head, to their history, into their childhood, as we know.

“So the meanings that people attach to the things that the managerial leader does are extraordinarily important but extraordinarily elusive and resistant. If there was ever a lifelong learning challenge, it’s to get better and better, more and more comfortable working with the meanings that other people possess about the organization, about the work to be done, about you the leader, about themselves, and so forth. You can never get enough of that in my opinion.”

Here’s my take:

1. The “meanings” to which Vaill refers include hopes, dreams, fears, doubts, and expectations as well as knowledge and understanding, in general, and what is perceived to be most relevant and of greatest value, in particular.

2. People manage people, not the work they do. Manage them well and they will be productive.

3. When communicating, the intended meaning of the given message may be quite different from what the recipient thinks the message means.

4. In face-to-face encounters, the impact of what is said is determined as follows: approximately 60-65% is determined by body language, approximately 25-30% by tone-of-voice, and only 5-15% by what is actually said.

Note: Vaill’s comments are excerpted from a conversation with Kerry A. Bunker and Laura Curnutt Santana, reprinted in Extraordinary Leadership: Addressing the Gaps in Senior Executive Development published by Jossey-Bass in collaboration with The Center for Creative Leadership (2010).

Universities Are Funding Jobs In New And Creative Ways…

The job market is so fragile. Here are two different approaches now being taken by universities to help out in this difficult era.

#1 – Law schools are literally, in some cases, paying law firms the salaries needed to hire their graduates. Here’s an excerpt from a New York Times article, In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That:

Others, like Duke and the University of Texas at Austin, offer stipends for students to take unpaid public interest internships. Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law even recently began paying profit-making law firms to hire its students.

(Law Schools are also retroactively raising a graduate’s grade point average.  I won’t even comment on that practice!  Details in the New York Times article)

#2 – MIT is now, in essence, funding startups from within the university. Here’s an excerpt of another New York Times article, The Idea Incubator Goes to Campus:

By providing academics like Professor Hart a bridge to the business world, M.I.T. is in the vanguard of a movement involving a handful of universities nationwide that work closely with investors to ensure that promising ideas are nurtured and turned into successful start-ups.

At first glance, the centers look like academic versions of business incubators. But universities are getting involved now at a much earlier stage than incubators typically do. Rather than offering seed money to businesses that already have a product and a staff, as incubators usually do, the universities are harvesting great ideas and then trying to find investors and businesspeople interested in developing them further and exploring their commercial viability.

In the jargon of academia, the locations of such matchmaking are known as “proof-of-concept centers,” and they’re among a number of new approaches to commercializing university research in more efficient and purposeful ways — and to preventing good ideas from dying quietly.

The “lesson” – colleges and universities need to demonstrate that their graduates are able to enter the workforce.  Though there have long been “placement” offices, this is an era requiring far more inventive and aggressive approaches.  This jobless era requires, and is generating, lots of new approaches.

The Best Resume On The Planet Makes No Difference If No Jobs Are Being Offered — More On The Jobless Era

(this is a post with a problem, and no solution – sorry about that.  I mean, really – sorry about that!)

The problem is bad – and not getting much better (maybe not any better).

On one “diary” on a political web site, an author wrote these words (excerpted):

Someone out there please tell me that I am not crazy.
I don’t need more training.
I don’t need a better resume.
All of the training in the world and the best resume on the planet makes no difference if no jobs are being offered.
America does not need better resumes.
It needs jobs.
In another thread, a kind commenter mentioned that jobs are out there, but you just have to be well-placed to take advantage of the opportunities.
It ain’t so.
The jobs are not out there.
That is what this crisis is about.
Unemployed people cannot simply will themselves into employment without some second party that is willing to hire them.

Yes, the article has a point of view about who needs to do what about the job situation – but the problem is pretty undeniable.  There is an actual, serious, shortage of jobs.  I know people who work at seeking a job as diligently as any employee at any Good to Great company works at doing a job – and they are not succeeding.  They seek and do not find.  The jobs are not there.

Watch the news, and you regularly see people who did work at well-paying jobs now cobbling together smaller, part-time, series of jobs until a real job comes open.  And the hours, and days, and weeks, and months, and now for some, the years, go by, and still no job.  I know a couple of folks who have gone from one good job to another, with major gaps of no job in between.

These are not uneducated people.  These are not undereducated people.  These are not unskilled people.  These are not people with a poor work ethic. These are people who are victims of an economy that is fragile, companies that were overtaken by circumstances beyond anyone’s ability to fix.

We need more jobs.

And the real jobs just don’t seem to come open.

I’ve said it before, and I say it again — a society without jobs is a society in real trouble.  We need all of our best people in business focusing on this one issue above all others until we get it fixed!

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Here are the numbers — this published in April.  There has been very slight improvement since April — but not much!:

The number of unemployed persons per job opening has started to increase again, hitting 5.5 in February, as just disclosed by the BLS’ most recent Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. In February, the total number of job openings declined from 2.85 million to 2.72 million sequentially. The job openings rate was little changed over the month at 2.1 percent. The hires rate (3.1 percent) and the separations rate (3.1 percent) were also little changed in February. Most importantly, there is no improvement in the rate of Hiring, which declined from 4.09 million to 3.96 million.